Depressed?

After putting in extensive thought over the last few months in trying to find ways to write about issues like mental health, depression and over thinking. I think I have come to the conclusion, (for the moment at least) there are two common lineages of depression. Of course, every person experiences it differently and I can’t even predict or start to write what goes on in someone else’s head. I can’t even talk about other people’s struggles and miseries, but what I can do is write about something I have figured.

Everyone keeps wondering what exactly went wrong with Sylvia Plath. She described her depression as being a glass bell jar being levitated over her and slowly frowning around her until it finally hit the ground and sealed her inside. It’s more like you can still see and hear things going around you but you’re totally separate, and nothing feels real. You can’t touch things or reach out to them, but somehow, nothing can really hear you. Life goes on, people move on and you just sort of watch in this lonely, full of irritability and frightening unconsciousness as days lifelessly change one after another and everyone else moves while you’re solid still. It’s this incredibly deviant feeling of being aware that you are still breathing, but somehow, nothing in you is quite there. You aren’t really living your life you were once meant to live. So the jar is one of yours. As are the endless mystifying days moving one after another.

You see, depression isn’t always an enclosed feeling, it can sometimes be a massive, bizarre sheet of white incomprehensibleness too.

So that’s one reason I came up with. Another reason is-

It’s like a waterfall, flowing into a huge river. But not a clean river, not like a placid flowing river like Thames, I mean like and polluted and diseased Cuyahoga River. And rather than for a little while, it’s been polluted for a long time now.
You know how tired you used to get when they made you do wall ball shots exercise during the squash practice? How you wretchedly have to keep every part of your body moving just to keep your core up long enough to take a breath, but it takes absolutely everything you have? It’s like that. And in that case, the breaths you manage to snatch are often short and frantic and it reminds you of your existence. The other fun part is, you’re not even sure if you want to do the whole fighting-to-be-strong thing. Sometimes it gets too much, you’re too drained, the rally is too long and you get lost up in the speed.
That would be one, trying to keep your core strong when it feels like everything in you and the game itself is just trying to pull or push you down, and in some ways yes, it would be so much easier to let go.

But the important thing to understand is that you are not the waterfall, the dirty river, or the jar, the depression is.
You can’t control the river from flowing with all the dirtiness, and when it gets too much yes you might get irritated or angry at yourself for not fighting harder, but at the moment you couldn’t, and that’s completely okay. How can you break out of a thick glass prison if no one can really reach you? How can you come out of that boundary when nobody really gets you?

Sometimes just breathing takes everything you have, and that’s just the way it is. And it’s okay. The polluted river is not your fault. The jar is not your fault. Depression isn’t anyone’s fault.